Are we all toast after 2017?

Cross-posted from Council on Foreign Relations . The annual International Energy Agency (IEA) World Energy Outlook (WEO) was published yesterday with an attention-grabbing headline : The chance of avoiding dangerous climate change will "be lost forever" unless the world changes course by 2017. The basic argument is simple. The world is constantly accumulating more fossil fuel-based infrastructure (power plants, cars, and so on). If the infrastructure that's expected to be in place by 2017 is allowed to live out its economic lifetime -- something that seems like a realistic assumption -- it alone will generate enough emissions to put the world on course for a greenhouse-gas concentration of 450 parts per million (ppm), which much of the climate policy world focuses on. Since it's implausible to imagine that no more carbon-emitting infrastructure will be built after 2017, th...